The Indo-European Language Family
The Indo-European Language Family: A Definition Today, nearly half of the population of the world speaks a language from the Indo-European language family. The Indo-European language family has been expanding all across the globe for the last five thousand years. Languages of the Indo-European language family generally sound like and closely resemble English, as well as they do other Indo-European languages. “Only 140 of the modern world 's 5,000 tongues belong to this language family, but their importance is far out of proportion to their numbers” (Diamond 249). Although there are a wide variety of other languages in a language family that are not Indo-European, a person living in the United States hears at least one Indo-European language being spoken every single day. A person living in Philadelphia hears an Indo-European language, but most likely a language from a different language family, such as Chinese or Japanese, every single day as well. Philadelphia is one of the most diverse cities in North America, and there is no surprise that there is such diversity among languages spoken in the city.
To the normal Indo-European language speaking person, it may not seem odd that many Indo-European languages sound similar in structure, grammar, and vocabulary; however, compared to the linguistic diversity among the many other languages of the world, the homogeneity of Indo-European languages is actually quite strange. It is hard to imagine that with the base of Indo-European languages being so similar, how could the differences between Indo-European languages have arose? One theory suggests that as speakers of the same original language spread out geographically, and there was limited contact present, dialects formed. These dialects, over time, ineluctably developed into their own individual languages, and the people who once spoke the same language could no longer understand each other. Therefore, because of geographical location, some languages may have been
To the normal Indo-European language speaking person, it may not seem odd that many Indo-European languages sound similar in structure, grammar, and vocabulary; however, compared to the linguistic diversity among the many other languages of the world, the homogeneity of Indo-European languages is actually quite strange. It is hard to imagine that with the base of Indo-European languages being so similar, how could the differences between Indo-European languages have arose? One theory suggests that as speakers of the same original language spread out geographically, and there was limited contact present, dialects formed. These dialects, over time, ineluctably developed into their own individual languages, and the people who once spoke the same language could no longer understand each other. Therefore, because of geographical location, some languages may have been
Cited: Diamond, Jared. The Third Chimpanzee. Harper, 1992. Print.